6 ms·

The reality is that most big tech companies want to get all the benefits of "going digital", while shifting all the costs or downsides of that move to the consu

The reality is that most big tech companies want to get all the benefits of "going digital", while shifting all the costs or downsides of that move to the consumers. This is not accidental. This is a long-term strategy backed by an elaborate PR campaign. The campaign was so successful that most people aren't even aware of how bizarre the whole idea of "renting" digital content really is. You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? This is a questions a lot of companies don't want you to be thinking about. More generally, it all comes down to the questions brilliantly formulated by Neal Postman: https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-questions/ https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-q...

sascha_sl 5y ago
> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. > How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? If you look beyond the big players you'll find some people earn more (semi-)self-publishing on the internet than they'd have ever earned with a publishing deal. On-demand/low volume print and having digital as your default channel also made "real" publishing deals available to more people. Being on store shelves was not actually that much better than Spotify for musicians accounting for volume, they just had less competition because now shelf space is unlimited.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation. That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    These things all still exist in some capacity, though obviously it has become more efficient. Bandwidth isn't free, for instance. The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).
- soperj 5y ago
  >This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
  - jonhohle 5y ago
    For collectors or even casual consumers, this secondary market has as much or more value than the primary market. My wife and son borrow an absurd amount of library books. I maintain a library of movies and games, most of which are second hand. And if I don’t like something, it goes back into the market for someone else to enjoy. There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting. Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it. Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books. I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    > Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide. Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world. I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space. NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place. (Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)
- crazygringo 5y ago
  > You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price. But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk. When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost. The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
- colllectorof 5y ago
  >> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. >This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that. Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
  - 6510 5y ago
    > It will create an entirely different system. Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video. It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth) After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      > we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% Yeah this will surely be more like 30%
    - Tostino 5y ago
      Only possible if the power dynamic somehow shifts in a significant way. Maybe it will, but I'm not very optimistic.
crossroadsguy 5y ago
People are so happy that they are fine with not finding their liked/fav songs regularly on Spotify even after they notice it has gone missing. And they also kinda accept the mediocre recommendation (often laden with ads and "place in front" for pay content) which just feels like habit after a while.
- danielheath 5y ago
  It’s particularly noticeable on spotify. I actually don’t mind the rental model (though it’s overpriced for how I use it), but you cannot remove songs from curated playlists and expect me not to notice.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Wouldn't say people are happy. "They accept" is much closer. They accept the mediocre, because there's nothing they can do about it, and they don't understand how any of it works.
  - jordan_curve 5y ago
    I’m happy. It’s not really a big deal to me if my uploaded content is removed and I think the service that Spotify provides is worth more than what I pay for it.
    - lambda_obrien 5y ago
      Same here. I used to have to borrow, steal, or buy content, but now for about 50 bucks a month i can subscribe to a few services and get all the tv, games, and music I want. Until that changes considerably, I'm fine with the status quo.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I'm glad, and I don't want to make you stop being happy. Happiness is more important than technology fads of the week. That said, I'm no longer using Spotify, and disappearing songs had a lot to do with it. I've been paying for a premium account for some 6-7 years, way longer than I should - it took me over a year to notice that I'm not actually using it, because half of my favorite songs are gone, and whenever I search for something particular, half of the time it's not there (or worse, there's some shitty cover of it). And it's not just the catalog that suffered since - also the UI of their mobile app rotten over time, and became incomprehensive. But back in ~2012 - 2015 I sure as hell was happy with their service, and evangelized it to all my friends, and I did feel it's worth more than what I'm paying for it. I guess losing music on Spotify isn't that big of a deal for most people, because - extrapolating music-related behavior from a couple dozen non-tech people I've observed over the years - the most popular music player isn't Spotify, it's YouTube. And YouTube does have it all, at least for now.
reaperducer 5y ago
How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services. I believe the context was refuting accusations in the Spotify dustup. I saw it on a site like macrumors, so some salt may be required.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services. Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of the revenue they collect.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Tidal, I believe, is the streaming service that gives most to the creators. This may or may not be related to Jay-Z being on the board.
  - vasco 5y ago
    Don't worry, Silicon Valley has already bought Tidal in the meantime.
smsm42 5y ago
The concept of renting alone is not bad - I mean, they have something you want (e.g. movie), you pay to watch it, then you don't need it anymore. Tried and true concept, same as me renting a tool from Home Depot - I use it for a day, then I don't need it anymore. It doesn't matter how replicable it is - when I use it, I don't care much about whether Home Depot has more tools like that. What is ridiculous is that they pretend the other option - "buying" - which is usually much more costly - is anything close to what people mean by "buying" in a non-digital non-DRM world. If I buy a book, the book is mine. I can read it forever, I can sell it, I can use it as a doorstopper if I like, but whatever I do it's mine. If I "buy" a movie on DRM platform, I can watch is only as long as the platform allows me to, and yet most people do not realize the profound difference. I think it's a good thing there's now a growing awareness that his is false pretense and it's time to shine a light on it.

sascha_sl 5y ago

> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. > How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? If you look beyond the big players you'll find some people earn more (semi-)self-publishing on the internet than they'd have ever earned with a publishing deal. On-demand/low volume print and having digital as your default channel also made "real" publishing deals available to more people. Being on store shelves was not actually that much better than Spotify for musicians accounting for volume, they just had less competition because now shelf space is unlimited.

scrollaway 5y ago
> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation. That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  These things all still exist in some capacity, though obviously it has become more efficient. Bandwidth isn't free, for instance. The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).
soperj 5y ago
>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
- jonhohle 5y ago
  For collectors or even casual consumers, this secondary market has as much or more value than the primary market. My wife and son borrow an absurd amount of library books. I maintain a library of movies and games, most of which are second hand. And if I don’t like something, it goes back into the market for someone else to enjoy. There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting. Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it. Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books. I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".
- MereInterest 5y ago
  > Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide. Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world. I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space. NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place. (Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)
crazygringo 5y ago
> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price. But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk. When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost. The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
colllectorof 5y ago
>> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. >This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that. Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
- 6510 5y ago
  > It will create an entirely different system. Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video. It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth) After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% Yeah this will surely be more like 30%
  - Tostino 5y ago
    Only possible if the power dynamic somehow shifts in a significant way. Maybe it will, but I'm not very optimistic.

crossroadsguy 5y ago

People are so happy that they are fine with not finding their liked/fav songs regularly on Spotify even after they notice it has gone missing. And they also kinda accept the mediocre recommendation (often laden with ads and "place in front" for pay content) which just feels like habit after a while.

danielheath 5y ago
It’s particularly noticeable on spotify. I actually don’t mind the rental model (though it’s overpriced for how I use it), but you cannot remove songs from curated playlists and expect me not to notice.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Wouldn't say people are happy. "They accept" is much closer. They accept the mediocre, because there's nothing they can do about it, and they don't understand how any of it works.
- jordan_curve 5y ago
  I’m happy. It’s not really a big deal to me if my uploaded content is removed and I think the service that Spotify provides is worth more than what I pay for it.
  - lambda_obrien 5y ago
    Same here. I used to have to borrow, steal, or buy content, but now for about 50 bucks a month i can subscribe to a few services and get all the tv, games, and music I want. Until that changes considerably, I'm fine with the status quo.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'm glad, and I don't want to make you stop being happy. Happiness is more important than technology fads of the week. That said, I'm no longer using Spotify, and disappearing songs had a lot to do with it. I've been paying for a premium account for some 6-7 years, way longer than I should - it took me over a year to notice that I'm not actually using it, because half of my favorite songs are gone, and whenever I search for something particular, half of the time it's not there (or worse, there's some shitty cover of it). And it's not just the catalog that suffered since - also the UI of their mobile app rotten over time, and became incomprehensive. But back in ~2012 - 2015 I sure as hell was happy with their service, and evangelized it to all my friends, and I did feel it's worth more than what I'm paying for it. I guess losing music on Spotify isn't that big of a deal for most people, because - extrapolating music-related behavior from a couple dozen non-tech people I've observed over the years - the most popular music player isn't Spotify, it's YouTube. And YouTube does have it all, at least for now.

reaperducer 5y ago

How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services. I believe the context was refuting accusations in the Spotify dustup. I saw it on a site like macrumors, so some salt may be required.

heavyset_go 5y ago
> FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services. Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of the revenue they collect.
FireBeyond 5y ago
Tidal, I believe, is the streaming service that gives most to the creators. This may or may not be related to Jay-Z being on the board.
- vasco 5y ago
  Don't worry, Silicon Valley has already bought Tidal in the meantime.

smsm42 5y ago

The concept of renting alone is not bad - I mean, they have something you want (e.g. movie), you pay to watch it, then you don't need it anymore. Tried and true concept, same as me renting a tool from Home Depot - I use it for a day, then I don't need it anymore. It doesn't matter how replicable it is - when I use it, I don't care much about whether Home Depot has more tools like that. What is ridiculous is that they pretend the other option - "buying" - which is usually much more costly - is anything close to what people mean by "buying" in a non-digital non-DRM world. If I buy a book, the book is mine. I can read it forever, I can sell it, I can use it as a doorstopper if I like, but whatever I do it's mine. If I "buy" a movie on DRM platform, I can watch is only as long as the platform allows me to, and yet most people do not realize the profound difference. I think it's a good thing there's now a growing awareness that his is false pretense and it's time to shine a light on it.